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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

FDA "Cautions" HFCS Pushers Over "Corn Sugar"

You know, when I was a kid we took our
garbage to the town dump. A guy named “Shorty” worked there,
burying the garbage with a bulldozer. We called him “the Dump Man."

Nowadays, of course, we take our “solid
waste” to the “sanitary landfill” where it can be “processed”
by “sanitation engineers.” We're still just taking our garbage to
the dump, but now it sounds so
much better.

That's
the theory behind the Corn Refiners Association's effort to rebrand
high-fructose corn syrup. On the heels of more and more studies that
essentially call the substance “garbage,” the producers – or
“pushers,” as I like to label them – are pulling out all the
stops in an effort to give the stuff a new image by calling it “corn
sugar.” It just sounds
so much better.

When I first
reported on this issue last year in an article entitled “The Corn Sugar
Scam; What's In a Name,” I quoted Shakespeare's familiar citation, “That which we
call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Now comes news
that the FDA still thinks the whole thing stinks.

See, the pushers
petitioned the FDA to allow them to make the change, prevaricating
that "the name 'corn sugar' more accurately reflects the source
of the food (corn), identifies the basic nature of the food (a
sugar), and discloses the food's function (a sweetener)." Then
they just went on ahead and did it. They launched a televised ad
campaign and set up websites, one of which uses “cornsugar” in
the URL. They “petitioned,” alright, but operating under the old
adage, “it's easier to seek forgiveness than permission,” they
didn't bother waiting for approval. And because the specious ad
campaign does not seek to promote a particular product, but rather an
entire industry, the FDA is something of a toothless tiger regarding
its ability to regulate the advertising.

But even toothless
tigers don't like having their tails pulled. In a July 12, 2011
letter obtained by the Associated Press, Barbara Schneeman, an FDA
director, wrote to the Corn Refiners Association to say she was
concerned with the pushers' interchangeable use of the terms “high
fructose corn syrup” and "corn sugar.” "We request that
you re-examine your websites and modify statements that use the term
'corn sugar' as a synonym for (high fructose corn syrup)."

That, of course,
drew an immediate response from the pushers; they yawned. Then they
sent the AP a blah-blah e-mail promising to review materials and to
make changes if necessary. In other words – specifically the words
of W.C. Fields, – “Go away, kid, ya bother me!”

But it
appears the tiger does have at least one good tooth: the FDA can
bust any food producer who
actually uses the
phony term in place of “high-fructose corn syrup” on any food
packaging.

All this comes
after the pushers had already been shot down by the FDA when they
attempted to get permission to drop the words “high-fructose” and
just call their product “corn syrup.” An FDA official called the
effort “misleading.” Ya think? This despite the fact that seven
pork-addicted senators from Corn Belt states filed a letter backing
the “corn syrup” snow job in the interest of clearing up
“consumer confusion.”

But the writing's on the wall; in a
recent survey, Kraft, Gatorade,
Pepsi, Hunt's, Heinz, Starbucks, Sara Lee and a slew of other
manufacturers have all removed HFCS from some of their product lines
in response to consumer concerns. And now the restaurant industry is
jumping on the bandwagon. Chains and privately owned eateries alike
are beginning to dump HFCS from their menus, both in response to
consumer demands and as a result of trying to upgrade to more
healthy, natural offerings. Wait for it.....here come the
pushers......”Corn is a natural product!!!” Yeah, so is hemlock.
Want a cup?

Besides – and restaurant chefs are
discovering this, too – anything made with the cheap, nasty crap
tastes cheap and nasty. Pat Herring, the Research and Development guy
for one of my favorite places, Jason's Deli, puts it best when he
says, “Food today has so many
ingredients that we've kind of dumbed-down our tastebuds.” He
referred to HFCS – which is conspicuously absent at Jason's – as
sounding “chemical-y” when compared to sugar and/or honey and
sagely adds that nobody goes to the pantry and gets a little HFCS to
add to their morning cereal.

And with corn
prices on the rise, HFCS isn't going to be a bargain much longer, so
a lot of food manufacturers are killing two birds with one stone;
they're trimming costs by reverting to cane sugar and they're looking
like health-conscious consumer crusaders at the same time. Win-win!

Excuse me, now. I'm
going to go knock back a Sierra Mist and fix a sandwich made with Jif
Peanut Butter on some Pepperidge Farm 100% Natural Bread. Maybe a
little Mott's Natural Applesauce on the side. And some Archway
Molasses Cookies or a little Dove chocolate for dessert. (All
HFCS-free products.)

Call
it what you will, tempus fugit, high-fructose
corn syrup. The hands on the popularity clock are nearing midnight
and your fancied-up Cinderella product is about to become a plain old
ear of corn again.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)